Ravinia 2019, Issue 6, Week 12

• • • • • Western classical music all but died out in China during the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and continued until the death of Mao Zedong 10 years later. As part of this brutal political crackdown, intellec- tuals, artists, and others seen as “class enemies” were persecuted, exiled to the countryside, and, in some cases, killed. But interest rekindled with the reopen- ing of the Central Conservatory of Beijing in 1978 and other music schools across the country as well as with top students later seeking advanced training in the United States and Europe. In recent years, the country’s interest in the genre has exploded. The Wilson Quarterly reported that some 36 million Chinese children were studying piano in 2012, six times more than their coun- terparts in the United States, and that number has no doubt climbed since. [A substantial part of that particular growth can be attibuted to the influence and stewardship of Lang Lang, whose career skyrocketed in 1999 when at Ra- vinia’s gala benefit concert he substituted at the last minute for André Watts in a performance with the Chicago Sympho- ny Orchestra.] New concert halls and opera houses have sprouted across the country, including the sleek, 1,200-seat Shanghai Symphony Hall, which opened in 2014. It was designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, who won the 2019 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the top honor in the field. “The Chinese have become an important factor in the global market- place,” Slatkin says, “and in order to do that, they realized, much as the Japanese and Koreans did, that they also had to have an understanding of the Western cultural world, especially after the death of the Mao. You had whole generations that didn’t know a single note of either Western classical or pop music, and then all of sudden this explosion took place to try to be part of the global economy.” After advanced studies at what is now known as the Berlin University of the Arts, Yu returned to China in 1992 to become principal conductor of the Central Opera Theatre in Beijing. In the • • • • • Not only is the Shanghai Symphony the oldest orchestra in the Far East, but it is also one of the longest established such ensembles anywhere in the world . PREVIOUS SPREAD: SOPHIE ZHAI (SSO) THIS PAGE: YAN LIANG 12 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 12 – AUGUST 25, 2019